My First Quilt - Part 1

In some ways my first quilt was a disaster, mostly because I didn't know what I was getting into when I took on the challenge. In case you didn't know this, quilting is kind of hard and time consuming. I know it's not exactly what all the cool kids are doing, so most people don't know the time and effort involved in a homemade quilt, but let me tell you it is quite a feat. That's part of why I want to blog about this experience, in the hopes that any other potential quilters can know what they're getting into and to explain to potential quilt buyers why they are so expensive.

First I'll give a little bit of back story. This quilt is for my brother in law, a 'gift' from his wife who is working with me to keep it a secret. I'm making it out of a boxful of old t-shirts of his that she snuck out of their house. These shirts have designs on front and back and most of the designs are huge (Harley Davidson shirts). Twelve shirts, front and back, totaling twenty-four squares ranging from 14 inches to 16 inches. This might not mean much to you, but if you do the math it adds up to a very big quilt. A very big quilt made of sacred t-shirts, but you know, no pressure.

The Plan

Well the first couple of weeks I was scared to cut anything, terrified that I would screw up the entire thing. I planned and planned and re-planned what I wanted to do, going so far as to make the whole quilt in graph paper before I touched a single t-shirt with anything sharp. I cut out separate squares for each t-shirt so I could shuffle them around until I got a placement I liked.  Here's the plan:

I added a little bit of 'fancy' stuff in the center because I thought it would make the whole thing look more 'quilt-y'. And yes this is done very primitively with colored pencils and even some crayon, but the idea was to get a feeling for the colors and the placement of each shirt. A lot of the squares have colored bars along the edges to square up designs that couldn't be cut square due to the neck of the t-shirt or other variables.

 It took me a few more weeks to get all of the pieces cut out and I had a list next to me at all times to keep track of the shirts. I'd assigned each shirt a number (with F or B to denote Front/Back) so that I knew their correct placement in the plan. My list kept me straight on all of the measurements for each block. Now this is where I made my first mistake.

If you ever make a t-shirt quilt the first thing you need to know is that you must, must, must buy fusible interfacing to stabilize the shirts. T-shirt material is horribly stretchy, bendy, and in all other ways unruly, which is very bad when you are trying to cut neat, straight lines that are supposed to be very exact in length and dimension. I did in fact have interfacing, but I worried that I hadn't bought enough so I cut the shirts down and then added the interfacing so I wouldn't waste interfacing cutting it down to size. Big mistake. As mentioned the jersey knit that t-shirts are made out of doesn't like to cooperate and this caused me some problems later. Lesson learned, buy extra interfacing and do that first.

Eventually I managed to get everything cut out, fused, and in neat piles around my work space. I had my sewing machine, thread, pins, and material all set up and ready to go. So of course the fear set in that I would again screw everything up if I started sewing. This quilt was filled with instances of stalling, mostly due to worry, and partially due to a busy schedule.

Getting Started (Finally)

 After a small kick in the butt from my sister in law, I finally got sewing. To avoid the shirts for as long as possible I started in the middle with the fancy little design I planned. This turned out to be a really good starting point as I built outward from here sewing concentric squares.

 

If you didn't already guess, this quilt was on a tight budget so the non-t-shirt parts were all done with scrap fabric I had from past projects and such. From this I learned why most quilters use very basic 100% cotton fabrics, because those tend not to slide or stretch. T-shirt material has stretch problems and silky material moves far too easily making precise measurements difficult. Quilting cotton materials start out nicely stiff, it's almost like working with paper, and doesn't stretch without a good amount of effort. Another lesson learned, they keep this kind of material in the quilting section of the fabric store for good reason.

But I managed to fight through all these issues and the middle design came together through some trial and error. The tiny triangles for the 'H' and 'D' were actually pretty fun to do and as long as I watched carefully that my lines stayed straight they turned out looking pretty good too.

I added an orange and a black border and then moved on to the nightmare of the big triangles that border this part. Another lesson I learned through this is that if you are going to work with triangles, unless you have a pattern to follow, get yourself a protractor. Yes you will feel like you are in Geometry, but believe me, when you make triangle that are supposed to come together at a 90 degree angle and they don't you will wish you had used one.


That's basically what happened to me and rather  than rip apart all the seams I ended up adding some new triangles that weren't part of the original design to fix the angles. The end result was actually better than what I had planned in my opinion, but having to troubleshoot in the middle of the process is not fun, so I'll avoid it where I can in the future.

I'm going to hang this up for now and come back for "My First Quilt - The Sequel" and maybe even "The Sequel Part 2" depending on how long winded I get next time. For now this is plenty I think.